Fort Worth: Outpost, Cowtown, Boomtown by Harold Rich (review)

Fort Worth, a city that has marketed itself as “Where the West Begins,” is not often thought of as a city of economic diversification or one that has much of an industrial past. In popular memory, it was primarily a community of cattle and oil, with recent additions from the military–industrial complex fleshing out its economic identity. Harold Rich, an independent scholar from Fort Worth, contends that, on the contrary, the city emerged as an industrial center during the oft-overlooked years from 1880–1920, thus setting the stage for the growth that would come in the post-First World War era.

Because previous Fort Worth historians have focused on other aspects of the city’s history, Rich’s effort closes a gap that exists in the current historiography. Up until now, no scholarly economic history of the city has been written, making this work a welcome addition. It is in mining economic data that Rich shines as an historian, using a plethora of material such as bank clearings and assets, wage and salary growth, and manufacturing value. While previous historians understandably point to the importance of railroads and packing plants for Fort Worth’s economic development, the author stresses the hard work boosters such as Buckley Burton Paddock (mistakenly referred to as Boardman Buckley Paddock throughout this work) and John Peter Smith that contributed to enlarging the city’s manufacturing base. Instead of relying solely on numbers to tell his story, Rich details local government’s struggles to create a stable infrastructure that could attract and support a more diverse economy.

This is not to say Fort Worthis without its weaknesses. While Rich does acknowledge the broader historiography of urban development in the United States at the turn of the century, such as William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West(W. W. Norton, 1992), he makes little effort to weave these works into his narrative. And some essential works of urban historiography that could have provided an even greater context for Fort Worth’s growth are left completely unmentioned, including Carl Abbott’s How Cities Won the West(University of New Mexico Press, 2008) and Roger Lotchin’s The Martial Metropolis(Praeger, 1984). Dallas appears throughout the book as a kind of foil to Fort Worth, yet no scholarly analysis of that city’s economy makes it into the narrative or even the bibliography. In addition, while Rich’s attempt to acknowledge the contributions made by black and Hispanic residents of Fort Worth is laudable and useful, placing this material in its own chapter in what is a chronological study breaks up the flow of this otherwise well-organized book. These weaknesses do not effectively undermine Rich’s larger goal of analyzing Fort Worth’s economic growth during a critical period of the city’s development. This is a work that has been needed for quite some time and will be useful to historians of both Fort Worth and urban growth at the turn of the century.